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Rain pattered down the windows. The streets were empty. The sky was full of grey clouds which flew overhead, casting Paris into the shadows. Marie hauled herself out of bed, almost begrudgingly, and peeked out of her curtains. It was another day. For some reason, she pained at the fact.
Slowly and lazily, she pulled on her clothes. The zip on her skirt got stuck and, though it was only for a second, it made her cry out with frustration. 'I need to stop being so fragile,' she sighed, throwing her jacket over her shoulder, 'it'll be the death of me.' Even the thought made her wince.
Marie trudged down the street, brushing her plain, brown hair out of her face and behind her ear. The atmosphere outside was eerie, it always had been - at least that was the case for the last few months. Marie, alongside many faceless people she saw slowly populating the streets of Paris, was on her way to work. Another boring day at her office job, or so she prayed that it would be.
Ever since the heroes Ladybug and Chat Noir came about, the life for her and almost everyone in the world had been a silent hell. Marie's will to pursue anything further than basic survival had been shattered by both Shadowmoth and the very heroes that she was being convinced were here to save her.
It was almost every day, at this point, that the villain would reign terror upon them. They were simple civilians, yet every emotion they made could have them weaponized against their city and their loved ones. Despite Marie's sadness and frustration - her depression that clouded over her at every step she took - she had to numb herself. She had to force herself to dissociate, and to allow herself to submit to being another, faceless background character in the cruel story she was placed into.
Marie was one of the lucky ones. She hadn't been akumatised before. Her loved ones, as far as she knew, were safe. Though, every part of her lived in constant fear. What would happen to her if she snapped? Would she not fall under Shadowmoth's radar, or would she fall victim to him and become worse than any villain that had ever emerged and be forced to murder her entire family for some stranger's sick game?
'It would be fine, though.' Strangers had told her. 'Ladybug would save you.'
That mindset only filled Marie with rage, an emotion that she always had to immediately subdue. There wasn't much comfort in knowing that her and her family's fate lay in the hands of a teenager. A child, even. That was what Ladybug was, a child.
Of course she was a child. All the heroes she brought along with her were children, too. For all Marie knew, she could just be giving those world-changing, godlike powers to her friends or classmates. She had to wonder if Ladybug was even trained, or a chosen professional. What if she had an ability to travel through time to stop whatever was happening before it ever did, or to teleport directly to Shadowmoth and snatch his miraculouses right from under his nose the minute she set eyes on him?
'No,' Marie assured herself as she sat down at her desk, starting up her office computer, 'If she could do that, she would have done that already.'
But there was always a mild, intrusive thought that reminded her that Ladybug and her friends were children, and that this could all be one cruel game which they've dragged out for months just to play superhero.
As soon as it crossed her mind, there was a crash across the city which rippled through the office block like thunder. Marie was frozen, a shiver being sent down her body as screams rang out in the building. There were fathers calling their children, mothers calling their families, businessmen and women grasping onto each other as if this would be their final day.
'It might as well be.' Marie thought, sighing calmly as she looked out of the window.
There was the villain, streets away, pillaging the houses and shopfronts. Fire flickered, embers filling the air as it all turned red. Her eyes followed the small, meaningless silhouettes of Ladybug and Chat Noir. They seemed to be out of hope. How typical.
The gargantuan monster breathed its fire onto the fleeting crowds, the flames hot enough to appear blue. The people managed to get away, but Marie felt no worry. Even whilst watching the women running away with their children in arms, she felt no sympathy, remorse nor hope. It was just another day. There was nothing else to it.
It was almost comical at this stage. At least to Marie, it was, though everyone else seemed to have retained their humanity above all. She watched as more heroes rushed to the scene from the false comfort of the tenth floor window. 'More children.' She observed, noticing their short statures and thin, untrained arms.
The villain approached the office block with more speed than Marie expected, though she didn't budge. She still peered down from the window, observing as the villain knocked down house after house.
The buildings crumbled. The windows were shattered, the glass and dust spraying down on the streets and bricks and walls pooling down on the ground like spilled sand. Shadowmoth's villain was larger than life, and incinerated everything in its path.
Under those buildings lay bodies; that's what Marie knew. There were people in those buildings, and Ladybug let them get destroyed. Every time there was a villain like this, hundreds if not thousands died, leaving Paris a ghost town until this child came to revive them.
Almost everyone like Marie had experienced torment from the likes of both Shadowmoth and the miraculous holders. She had known people who had gotten crushed, burnt, turned to gold dust, vanished, sent into space under the belief that they would perish there with no hope of contacting home before their body gave out. She had watched before as Ladybug let those buildings be damaged, as innocent people lost their lives, as if it was some kind of collateral. To Ladybug, Chat Noir and all of their assistants, people like Marie knew they were disposable. They were faceless, meaningless, and intended to be destroyed.
Ladybug and Chat Noir never saved Paris, they merely changed who ruined it. Marie and thousands of others wondered why they hadn't caught him yet, or why the government wouldn't step up and help find Shadowmoth's identity since the heroes seemed so incapable of it. They know his voice and his movements, so why not track him? Why was everyone so set on leaving everything to two teenagers who didn't seem to know what they were doing?
The villain was now at the foot of the office block, and Marie stood still. It let out a mighty roar, one that provoked a squeal and cry of terror from her coworkers that tried desperately to escape the building to no avail. The wretched thing charged up a fiery punch, aiming at the first story and obliterating it.
Time stood still. The office went silent, just for a second. Marie let out a sigh, her arms slack at her sides, her back slouched and her eyelids heavy. It wasn't long until the building came crashing down.
The floor beneath her moved, being swung down onto the ground many metres below. The fire licked up the walls, the windows shattered by the sheer force in which the building toppled and crunched onto itself, the support beams being broken from below. Screams and cries were heard, Marie's hearing being blurred and hindered by the pressure and speed, and her face and clothes being sliced into by the shards of glass that shot past her.
She saw a glimpse of Ladybug. The hero didn't look at Marie, she didn't look at the people screaming to their deaths, she instead looked at the building with a sigh of failure. They were collateral, Marie knew as her eye spotted the flaming pavement before she was crushed into it.
All of her bones were broken. She wished that she went numb in the process, but her nerves were as alive as ever. The pressure and sharpness of the debris encompassed Marie as her fingers gripped onto the red-hot road in pain, searing off her prints. The smell of blood was prominent in the air, itching at her nose in a familiar way as she heard sobbing in the background - the kind of sobbing you hear from a man who was never ready to face death at an age like this.
Her body gave out, and it couldn't have been any sooner. There was then nothing, but before that was a raging feeling of anguish that bubbled up inside of Marie before her physicality failed itself and her heart ceased to beat.
Everyone in Paris had felt death. Everyone in Paris knew what it was like to die and it had tormented every one of them at every breath they took. The human mind wasn't built to withstand the knowledge of what it was like to truly pass away, let alone to do so in such horrific ways, multiple times, and live to deal with the memory. As the villains murdered Paris, leaving it a ghost town, Ladybug revived them all only to let the people live as walking dead. They were tired, traumatised, and Ladybug just couldn't care. Every time they saw her face they remembered what it was like to die, and whenever they did so they writhed in the pain of living with it.
Nobody in Paris was meant to be alive. They lived with the pain of living, and are revived only to die another faceless death, with the knowledge that every time their heart stopped, it could be the last.
Ladybug had their lives, and she didn't care.
When Marie awoke in a Paris almost foreign to her, stood back by the window with her body intact, she let out a small cry.
Ladybug, in the distance, approached Chat Noir and her fellow heroes. She smiled, held out a hand, and did her signature fist-bump.
'They saved the day.' Marie sarcastically thought. 'They saved none of us.'
Her body still felt lifeless; her hands, though healthy, still felt burnt. The crying in the office hadn't ceased, and the feeling of losing their lives hadn't been comforted nor thwarted. It was only a matter of time until it would all happen again, and when that time came it could be their last.
Something in Marie felt like Ladybug could have stopped this. Something in Marie wished, whenever she watched that ignorant, childish fist-bump:
'Please, next time…'
'Keep us buried.'